Building a Camp Fire Hot Tub

We started with a livestock water tub from Tractor Supply. To heat the water, we purchased a coil of copper pipe. We spread the pipe out gently and supported it with some pieces of steel and bolts. We then used CPVC rated for hot water to connect the coil to the tub. The pipe coming out of the tub is at the bottom of the tank and the pipe coming in is at the top. Our idea is that the cold water will sink to the bottom, move through the pipe and rise through the coil as it is heated, self-circulation. And it worked! You could actually feel the hot water current pushing into the tub.

Improvements we could make:

Mechanical circulation would speed up time to heat the water.
The water was too hot for the CPVC, we should have used copper for all piping.
We have had a lot of comments that our water was too dirty, but that didn’t bother us…

This video was featured on a number of facebook channels, the largest being LADbible. Across channels, it received over 2k shares and over 3 million views!

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